SUNAAD RAGHURAM writes: Huge cauldrons sit on a three-pointed stone platform fuelled by fire from large logs of wood. Inside, the cavernous vessel is boiling a thick gravy of millet. Soon the millet will be spread out on a large slab of stone to cool off.

With the millet is mixed horse gram. And then expert tribal hands turn the entire concoction into ball-shaped mounds, almost the size of a football each.

It’s snack time for the working elephants at the Balle camp in the jungles inside which flows the placid Kabini.

As the mahouts bring in their wards every day at nine in the morning and then again at about six in the evening, the sight of the huge creatures being fed their snack is amusing.

The elephants on their part stand in a row resting their trunks on the wooden pole fixed between two stout posts, waiting for their turn.

And no sooner do the mahouts begin to walk in their direction with the millet balls in their hands than the mouths grow wide open with the trunk pulled to a grotesque angle.

Pop go the balls one after the other and disappear at once into the large cave that is their tummy!

Why this diet? Just to drive away the boredom of having to eat leaves and grass and bark for 18 hours a day!

The star attraction at Balle, for as long as I can remember, was Drona, the world famous elephant who had set a record of having carried the golden howdah during the Dasara procession in Mysore consecutively for 18 years.

A handsome creature of massive proportions with tusks that glistened like perfectly shaped swords just unsheathed from their scabbards, he was the cynosure of a million eyes every time he walked, with an imperial gait, at the end of the 2 km long procession on the auspicious Vijayadashami day.

Drona’s mahout Bhojappa always told me that the elephant was so sensitive that he just wouldn’t relish the idea of anybody other than his mahout sitting atop him. Drona would shrug and shake his back, if any of us ‘lesser mortals’ tried hitching a ride. Such was his royal demeanour.

But as terrible fate would have it, he died tragically a few years ago after being electrocuted at a place called Karadi Halla by the high-tension electric wire passing through the Kakanakote jungles. I remember the whole of Mysore grieving for him.

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The elephant camp situated at Balle on the inter-state highway leading to Manandavadi in Kerala can be reached from Karapur in less than half an hour.

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The memory is still very vivid in my mind of the elephants in the camp at the Kalkere range in the Nagarhole jungles. The year was 1998, some time during the early monsoon months. That was the year Balarama was supposed to carry the golden Howdah for the first time, since the unfortunate death of Drona. Balarama is one of those elephants who would do justice to the phrase ‘gentle giant’. A day had passed since our arrival at the IB in Kalkere . We had just come back from a safari at Nagarahole early in the morning. The mahouts have a custom of letting the elephants lose in the jungle during the evenings, to let the gentle giants graze . They go back in the morning to ‘fetch’ them. It was during one of these times that one of the mahouts had prepared these football sized ragi balls and had kept it on a wooden platform and had gone back to his ‘haadi’ [hamlet], unmindful of the elephants thinking the y were in the jungle , grazing. But to everyone’s amus e ment there came an elephant, the blue eyed boy, or the trouble-maker Arjuna [the youngest among all the elephants there], and gulp gulp gulp..! He ate all four ragi balls that had been prepared for the entire group of elephants..!!